[Marnie Baranuik 02.5] Cold Company (9 page)

As though reading my mind, Harry offered me a smile that didn't go anywhere near touching his eyes; history weighed heavy in the corners of his mouth. “Are you so simple as to believe that these assassinations did not occur before the notorious Finn and his dreadfully honest companion exposed my kind?”

“What I believe, Harry, is that without George, Danika Sherlock has lost her flippin’ mind,” I said. Seven years post-Bond, like a tire leaking around a nail, Danika Sherlock's residual Talent was hissing flat; without her revenant, the solo DaySitter had no way of gassing up the proverbial psychic tank. In the next few years she'd be no more psychic than your average 1–900 daily tarot reader, (Only $4.99 a minute! First minute free!) “Last I heard, she was working on a reality show about her day-to-day life. That ought to be about as intellectually stimulating as a Teletubbies marathon.”

“I suppose you'd have me accept that you would get on just fine without me?”

“Of course, I'd be fine. I'd have Tinky Winky and Po,” I teased, but chasing off the unease wasn't that easy. I couldn't imagine… I glanced up at Harry while he meticulously filed a thumbnail, blowing daintily on the edge. No, I couldn't, didn't want to imagine being in Danika's place; I had reasons not to like her, but no one should have to lose a part of themselves like that.

“You should have collectively denied Mr. Aaman's claim,” Harry said without energy, an old argument spoken by every Bonded revenant who craved a return to anonymity. One by one, other psychics had reluctantly followed Aaman's example and admitted the truth about the source of their powers—that we were guardians who merely borrowed and directed power that belonged to a revenant we secretly protected, nourished and nurtured. After Renault's proof of his true nature, what choice did we have?

Now any psychic who denied having a revenant in their care was either fake, or good at hiding the casket. Harry was right, of course: admitting it had put us all at risk. The laws in both Canada and the United States had no provisions to protect the undead, though they were pretty swift about spelling out that any crimes committed by revenants were punishable by death. Vampire hunters, once considered eccentric weirdos chasing shadows, were the new superheroes. A few of the prolific vampire hunters, like the inexhaustible Mark “105 Kills” Batten, were eventually hired by the FBI.

Instead of wasting my breath—to the one person in the world who understood my feelings better than I did, no less—I said, “That's my favorite shirt, Harry.”

His head came up and he touched his chest, fingertips languorously grazing the buttons. “I know.”

“I'd be a smoking ruin without you.”

“So kind of you to say, my dulcet doe.”

“A gibbering lunatic, slobbering and raving, trapped in a state of permanent psychosis,” I expounded.

His eyes became heavy-lidded; he released through the Bond a dollop of appeasement. “Not a terribly drastic change, then.”

I sank deeper into the claw foot tub, turned the water on with my toes to heat the water back to near-scalding. “Boy, you're awfully sassy, considering I have a vampire hunter on speed dial.”

My thoughts strayed back to Sherlock and her lying, cheating hard-bodied fiancé and her TV show and her drooping Talent. I may have only worked one case with the FBI, but I'd been training with GD&C since I inherited Harry when I was seventeen, working mostly on missing persons cases gone cold. Because of the media attention on psychics and their work since 2001, I had always tried to be careful not to say anything catty about Danika, unless it was to Harry; my Cold Company always shouldered my troubles with unflagging loyalty and compassionate dedication.

“When was the last time you had a pedicure, love?” he said with displeasure. “Your nail polish looks as though it has been chewed off by rats.”

“I was just thinking nice things about you, but I take ‘em all back.”

“Or a manicure?” he continued. “You know, sometimes the gloves come off in mixed company. For example, in the bath. I say, that is a decidedly unladylike finger gesture.”

“Shouldn't you be in your casket?”

He motioned meaningfully at the dark frosted window, where hail had turned to a noisy winter snowstorm. Clouds had blacked-out the sun; until the burden of the hidden sun's reign became too taxing on him, he'd stay with me.

After tidying and folding my mess of tossed-aside clothes, he opened the linen closet and removed a dark burgundy box, from which he drew his G. B. Kent & Sons hairbrush. A ‘Military Oval’, he'd once told me, the disappointed inflection in his voice indicating I should have recognized what it was. His last DaySitter, my grandma Vi, would have known. Grooming his short-clipped hair by touch, he kept his back to the empty mirror. He'd been blond in life, his hair thinning in front . While his hair had darkened to sandy, death hadn't changed his hairline. He wasn't about to lose any more hair, but it wasn't going to grow back, either. Hence, Harry's enduring fondness of hats.

He sensed me inspecting him and paused in his grooming, meeting my gaze steadily until he was satisfied that I was pleased with what I saw. I showed him an adoring smile.

“Why did you open the door this morning?” he asked.

“What else am I'm gonna do, leave them on the porch in a hail storm?” I mulled that over. “Why didn't I leave them out in the hail storm?”

“One can only assume that you wanted Agent Batten inside.” He gave me a long, questioning look. “If he had come alone, would you have let him in?”

“Did it occur to you that maybe it was Gary Chapel I wanted to chat with?”

“Don't be absurd,” he said gravely. “Are you holding Agent Batten to blame for the attack in Buffalo?”

He wanted to hear me say it; Harry didn't need to ask me that or anything else. Thanks to our Bond he knew exactly how I felt. Frankly, I was no longer sure if the weight of his mind pressing down on mine hadn't evolved over the years into something stronger, something worse; that an empathic revenant could eventually tinker with your emotions, as he crossed from old to truly ancient, could dabble with the puzzle of your heart, was a horrific prospect. If that was the case with Harry, he wasn't dumb enough to admit it to me.

I motioned for him to pass the nail brush. “He couldn't have predicted the shooting. No one expected a rev to be armed.”

“Revenants choosing firearms over fangs and superhuman strength. What is this world coming to?” Harry agreed.

“That rev—” At Harry's displeased ask, I remembered my manners. “Jeremiah Prost was over a century dead and his mind control was excellent. It took less than ten seconds: Batten was his, I was his.”

“May I remind you?” He paused in his hair brushing. “I hate to, but may I?”

“Yes, I know. Fourth Canon.”

“Fourth Canon,” Harry said as though he hadn't heard me. “Safeguard oneself chiefly against the dead, for the mind of a DaySitter is far more vulnerable to the call of the grave than is the mind of a mundane.”

“I got it.” I scrubbed with the nail brush more vigorously than was necessary. “Something to do with open channels in my mind… not sure how I could fix that.”

“By avoiding revenants altogether, I should say, unless your advocate was backing you up,” he said, meaning himself. “Twould not be a difficult task. My kind is hardly roaming ten-deep in the streets. There are, at most, four dozen immortals left in America. You should only come upon one if you meant to, as was the case with Mr. Prost.” He plucked an imaginary piece of lint off the front of his shirt. “Alas, I fear you do not always learn from your mistakes.”

My mistakes? It had been Harry's decision not to come with me from Portland to Buffalo on my first official FBI case. If he had… Harry cocked his head at me curiously and I scratched the critical thought.

Sinking up to my chin, blowing the bubbles away from my lips, I remembered with perfect clarity everything about the encounter with Prost. The slip-splash as cabs cruised the glittering, rain-soaked streets; the smells of the bakery on the corner, sewer gas from the manholes. But mostly the snap of singed sweets, that distinct scent of revenant magic that should have sparked a warning in my mind; the buzz ramping up through my veins like a cold thrill when I saw Jeremiah's form emerge into the pale circle of the streetlight. The frosty brush of the rogue revenant raising my hackles as he brazenly walked past us despite Batten's barked orders and drawn gun. As he defied us, the whole alley frothed in his wake, rolling up off the cement like the mist from Niagara Falls. Savage was his hunger, unrelenting, breathtaking, coursing through my veins, blocking out coherent thought until all that was left were base urges, primal needs.

Not in pursuit of justice, no, but rushing toward his company, delirious in my desire to present myself in submission before him. I had taken three sprinting steps after Prost when he spun (he'd won, dear God, he'd already won, with the first step) grinning around an enormous pair of fully extended fangs, and drew from a shoulder holster no one expected him to be wearing. He fired a .22 three times before I knew what was happening, hitting me once in the shoulder and spinning me backwards off my feet. The second bullet took me high in the back, missing my spine by a hair. The third bullet sang down the alley, jerking Batten out of the revenant's mind control. There'd been a jumble of activity, Batten calling for backup, giving a brief chase with his kit clanging open and stakes scattering in the grit, before he'd thrown himself to his knees beside me. Jeremiah 
had melted into the distance, and I, heels digging asphalt, bled into the rotting sludge behind a dumpster for a good five minutes before the ambulance got there.

Harry's grip hit the countertop and something cracked. He said thickly, “Please, stop that.”

“Sorry.” I brushed the bitterness aside. “Like I said, the gun made no sense. Then again, Prost was being arrested by the FBI for killing…” Don't say the number, “Children. He was obviously capable of abnormal behavior. I should have known to expect anything.”

Harry nodded. “Mr. Prost was hungry, yet he chose to execute you instead of draining you.”

“It was just me and Batten in that alley.” And we might have seen the homicidal revenant lurking in the shadows if Mark and I hadn't been fighting like a couple of stray cats in heat. Harry didn't need to hear that part. “If Jeremiah wanted to feed, he could have taken his time, sat me down across his lap, ripped my heart out of my ribcage and chowed down. But I wasn't his preference.”

“Love by the dram,” Harry said quietly, almost to himself. “Poor little bobbins.”

“As it was, only the sound of the gunshot snapped Batten out of the spell or whatever.”

Harry smiled indulgently. “Or whatever.”

“Spell, Mojo, juju, the Blue Sense, psi… magic is all the same no matter what you call it.” Sometimes the word “whatever” encompassed everything best, but Harry didn't share my opinion; Harry was a stickler.

“So you do not blame Agent Batten?” he probed, putting away his oval hairbrush and returning it to its spot on the shelf. He took a bottle of vitamins out of the medicine cabinet and shook two into his palm.

“Not for that.”

“Just for instigating the intercourse.” Harry passed me a pumice stone and two small white pills, barely worth taking. I dry-swallowed, then sighed at him.

“No,” I said, rolling my eyes at ‘intercourse’. “I blame him for instigating the sex even though he was engaged, for neglecting to 
mention that he was already engaged before the sex, for being a total jerkwad after the sex. And for not coming to see me in the hospital.” And for being unforgettable.

“And for having the appalling taste to propose to Danika Sherlock?” Harry unfolded a towel and fluffed it while I pulled the plug.

“That's his problem, not mine.”

“Yes, I imagine it probably is.” He wasn't buying it. He wrapped the towel around me while I pointed at my chest.

“Seriously, if he wants to screw Plain Jane and then marry Bimbo Barbie…” I didn't know how to finish that. It was pointless to pretend it hadn't hurt. Finding out the facts had sent me reeling, but to be fair, Batten hadn't promised me anything. He just hadn't told me the whole truth.

“Is that what I should have tattooed on my wrist, then? Plain Jane?” Harry studied me, head cocked. “Perhaps if you cut your hair, a bit of fringe, some layering.”

I grabbed a handful of ash blond hair protectively. Damp trails of it curled around my fist and I wagged it at him. “It took me a whole year to grow it this long.”

“Queen Anne's dead.” Harry's version of duh.

“And what do you mean, ‘if you cut your hair’?” I demanded. “What's wrong with my hair?”

“You always wear it in a ponytail. I have often thought it rather dull.”

“This from a man who hasn't changed his hairstyle since 1720.”

“Insolent bird!” Harry laughed, delighted, his smile revealing a row of straight white teeth without the slightest hint of fang; while Harry was closer to plain than handsome, his mouth looked soft and scandalously kissable, though I'd given up hopes of ever finding out. “You cannot possibly know that!”

“You're forgetting James Latham painted a lovely portrait of you that year,” I happily reminded him. “It hangs above our mantle in the living room.”

“What manner of maniac builds a mantle above that modern monstrosity of a wood stove, I ask you? Despite affording us with 
the purest good fortune of having a place to put our candelabra, it is completely inappropriate to the space.”

“Changing the subject!” I accused. “You look exactly the same as you always have, Lord Dreppenstedt, except for the lace cravats and tricorne hats. Whatever happened to that stuff, anyway?”

Harry flicked me in the butt with a hand towel. “I keep them in storage, of course. I plan to look dashing at your funeral.”

(
Touched
 by A.J. Aalto available in print and ebook formats from your favorite online retailers!)

ALSO BY A.J. AALTO

Touched
(Book One of the Marnie Baranuik Files)